PR for Crowdfunding Campaigns

My name is Monica Rosenfeld. I’m a professional speaker and the founder of WordStorm PR. In today’s video, I’m going to talk about PR for crowdfunding campaigns, and why it’s actually not such a good idea to go down this route.

We get calls all year long from people launching crowdfunding campaigns and wanting us to help by getting them into mass media, which sounds like a good idea, and it would be a great idea, but usually, I steer them in another direction. The reason for this is that crowdfunding campaigns and doing the publicity for them have a few challenges.

Firstly, quite often the products are not yet in market, and journalists don’t want to generally report on products that may come to fruition. They want to comment on products that are in market, and that are appealing and have some sort of advantage for their audience.

The second challenge with doing PR for a crowdfunding campaign is the very short time frame you have to work with. Most crowdfunding campaigns are under a month long, and when we pitch a story to a journalist and they pick up the story, we don’t have full control over when that story will get a run or will go to air. It may not be the optimal time within that month for the crowdfunding campaign, and it may not even be in that month at all.

So what I always suggest to people who contact me about this is really use strong and effective social media strategies to drive your crowdfunding campaign. And don’t start it too late. It’s too late when you’re about press play to build that community, that community should already be developed and raring to go and get behind your idea.

Now once you’ve blitzed the crowdfunding campaign and you’ve had some huge success or set some kind of record, that is when journalists will want to know about it, because that’s newsworthy, it’s something that’s been achieved, you can hang that angle on something.

So hope this has been of help to all of you out there thinking of doing a crowdfunding campaign. Feel free to ask me any questions, and I look forward to seeing you next week.